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This article argues that the qualities associated with citizenship were put under increased pressure by the dissolution of states that followed the wars and the collapse of empires in the mid-twentieth century. The reconfigured states faced the challenge of redefining their national identity and, consequently, their relationship with the constituent populations. Displacements, both internal and across redrawn borders, were a frequent occurrence. The introduction argues that the experiences of what Arendt terms ‘national minorities’ demonstrate the inconsistencies in the protection offered to citizens whose ethnicity or race differed from the state’s imagined ideal citizen. Structured in two parts, this special issue examines firstly the response of states and finds that they wield citizenship law as a means of shaping and regulating their national identity. Secondly, it examines the implications of displacement for citizens, and their new cultural distinctiveness and sense of belonging that contribute to constructions of citizenship.

This article looks at the end of colonial Algeria and the subsequent repatriation of the settler population as it was experienced and remembered by the settler (or pied-noir) repatriates in the aft...

This article offers a longitudinal review of print media representations of the European population in Algeria, from the final months of the Algerian war to commemorative coverage of the 50th anniversary in 2012. It traces the evolution of the metropole's relatively hostile view of the Francais d'Algerie as a ‘foreign’ people to the depiction of an integrated group whose voice has become incorporated within official memory. With reference to the anniversary coverage of 2012, it argues that while the pied-noir lobby was partially successful in persuading the media to adopt aspects of their historical narrative, the socio-political context of the ‘guerre de memoires’ produced challenges to that narrative, with the relativisation of the pied-noir experience as one aspect of a broader memorial mosaic of the war.

A glance back over past decades reveals the social landscape of France to be marked by an overlapping succession of formations identified or self-identifying as ‘generations’, from post-war baby-bo...

French literary representations of Algeria are frequently characterised by a tendency towards the envisioning of an imagined land, whether fed by orientalist or colonial ideology, or by the nostalg...

This article draws on Kristeva's theories of the foreigner within the national boundaries and, combining this with her earlier work on the abject, considers the challenge posed by the individual who is rejected as foreign, to the boundaries which constitute collective and individual identity. With reference to Prévost's Le Passé sous silence (1998), it argues that the solutions posited by Kristeva are of limited value within contemporary French society, and concludes by considering the potential of literature as an alternative means of reconciliation with otherness.

Since decolonisation, the increase in immigration from France's former colonies in North Africa has prompted metropolitan writers to reconsider conceptions of French society. In their novels, Tournier and Hocquenghem present contemporary France through the defamiliarising eyes of a North African immigrant, who serves as a device for the critique of French culture. This article investigates the opposition between the objectifying culture of the West, and the immigrants' desert culture. It argues that this opposition is flawed, and that the division is between actual practices of seeing and the cultural discourses around vision.

A factor in the use of native cassava starch for commercial food production is its variability. Agronomic factors and processing protocols alter the performance of starch in food products. Work carried out at the University of Nottingham has indicated that cassava is particularly susceptible to starch conversion when being extruded. Also, cassava seems particularly liable to undergo oxidative reductive depolymerisation compared with other tuber and cereal starches. Low addition rates of substances that interact with oxygen to produce free radicals cause changes in the behaviour of starches. Agents that seem to have an effect on cassava include: sulfite, ascorbic acid and glutathione. The actual level of these compounds is important as maximum degradation is caused at a specific addition rate. Changes caused by the inclusion of the redox agents can be stopped or at least reduced by the use of the free radical terminator, propyl gallate. The inclusion of sulfite with cassava starch has been shown to alter the gelatinisation properties of the granules, the viscosity of pastes and the average molecular weight of amylose or amylopectin or of both polysaccharides.

The influence of a range of additives on the change in the viscosity of cassava starch pastes on ageing following gelatinisation has been investigated. The inclusion of sulfite with pasted starch markedly decreases the viscosity of the paste with time and this is prevented by the addition of propyl gallate. Intrinsic viscosity measurements strongly support the view that sulfite addition promotes polysaccharide degradation. Ascorbate has a greater degradative effect than sulfite, whereas only limited degradation is observed with glutathione. Salts such as sodium chloride and sodium sulfate show no effect on viscosity. If the chelating agent EDTA is added as well as sulfite, the reduction in viscosity is smaller, although the effect is not cancelled out completely. Interestingly, the degradative effect of sulfite and ascorbate can be shown at 30, 60 and 80° C. The results presented uphold the previous suggestion that sulfite addition promotes oxidative reductive depolymerisation (ORD) and largely rule out any residual enzyme activity as the cause. It is suggested that the strong degradative action of ascorbate on starch could be one of the explanations for its action in baked products.

Free Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin was detected in the stools of 11 patients with diarrhoea. All had high faecal counts of enterotoxigenic strains of C perfringens, mostly of serotypes not commonly associated with food poisoning. 10 of these 11 patients had severe or prolonged diarrhoea which had developed after antibiotic treatment. Enterotoxigenic C perfringens appears to be one of the causes of antibiotic-associated diarrhoea.

During enterohepatic circulation conjugated steroids are hydrolyzed by intestinal bacteria, further metabolized mainly by anaerobic bacteria, reabsorbed, reconjugated and delivered to the blood for renal excretion. 21-Dehydroxlylation of tetrahydrodeoxycorticosterone (THCOD) to pregnanolone is performed exclusively by Eubacterium lentum, a normal inhabitant of the intestinal flora. The concentration of E. lentum in feces can be determined from the highest dilution of fresh voided stool capable of 21-dehydroxylating THDOC. Such studies revealed that the concentration increases from 106/g wet feces during the first year of life to 108/g feces in the 7th and 8th decade. Colonization appears to be independent of diet since the organisms are present in babies whether breast-fed or on formula, in subjects on a “Western diet” and in Africans consuming a diet low in meat and fat.

Fifty recent clinical isolates of the B.fragilis group were tested to determine their susceptibility to ampicillin, carbenicillin, mezlocillin, azlocillin and piperacillin using an agar dilution technique. The influence of clavulanic acid on the penicillin susceptibility of these strains was determined by incorporating 2 mg/1 of clavulanic acid into test media. The production of beta-lactamase by the strains was determined by the nitrocefin test and their isoelectric points by focusing on Polyacrylamide gel. Piperacillin was generally the most active of the penicillins tested and carbenicillin the least active with MIC50 values of 8 and 32 respectively. Although mezlocillin was slightly more active than piperacillin against highly resistant strains (MIC 64 mg/1 ampicillin) it was less active against strains with moderate resistance (16–32 mg/1 ampicillin). The majority of resistant strains became at least fivefold more susceptible to ampicillin and carbenicillin in the presence of clavulanic acid, while this effect was less marked for the acylureidopenicillins. In 18% of strains the susceptibility to all five penicillins tested was virtually unaffected by the presence of clavulanic acid.